Helldivers 2 has its next premium warbond, called Democratic Detonation, and there’s an explosive theme with this one.
Democratic Detonation adds new weapons, including an Exploding Crossbow and Grenade Pistol that are sure to cause as much damage to teammates as they are the automatons and terminids. However, there is new armor that helps with the inevitable increase in explosive damage across the battlefield.
As with previous Premium Warbonds, Democratic Detonation costs 1,000 Super Credits. While you can earn Super Credits from gameplay and Warbonds, you can also buy them for real-world money. Via the in-game shop, 1,000 Super Credits costs $9.99. Premium Warbonds do not expire, so you can work your way through them at your own pace safe in the knowledge their items will remain available.
Here’s a list of everything in Helldivers 2’s new Democratic Detonation Warbond, per Arrowhead:
Firepower
BR-14 Adjudicator Rifle
Deliver righteous judgement to your enemies with accuracy. This armour-penetrating assault rifle is best used against smaller groups.
R-36 Eruptor Rifle
Keep your distance… this bolt-action rifle fires jet-assisted shells that explode shrapnel in all directions upon impact. All directions. Even your face.
CB-9 Exploding Crossbow
Kaboom! Enjoy powerful exploding bolts that dish out max damage upon direct impact. Gravity must be accounted for when aiming.
Secondary Weapons & Utility Booster
G-123 Thermite Grenade
This little beauty can stick to surfaces before burning up to a toasty 2000°C.
GP-31 Grenade Pistol
Does what it says on the label – a pistol that fires grenades. Don’t forget to reload between shots though.
Expert Extraction Pilot Booster
Need to get out of a jam fast? This booster lowers the time it takes for the extraction shuttle to reach the extraction beacon. Home in time for dinner.
Armor
CE-27 Ground Breaker
Medium Armor.
“The ground is just another obstacle that hasn’t yet been cleared.” – SGM Janet Jones, Excavation Corps Founder.
CE-07 Demolition Specialist
Light Armor.
Originally worn by Lunar terraformers, this suit can withstand rapid changes in pressure, heat, and personal velocity.
FS-55 Devastator
Heavy Armor.
Domestic versions of this armour allow colonial farmers to safely plant crops and mines side-by-side while staying in one piece.
Of course, always accessorise your choice of armour with brand-new capes – Harbinger of True Equality, Eagle’s Fury, or Freedom’s Tapestry – as you mix and match your lethal loadout of liberation.
If you’re looking for more on Helldivers 2, check out IGN’s feature on the Let Me Solo Her of Helldivers 2, a player who has answered over 100 SOS Beacons as part of a mission to help others.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
There’s a huge price drop on one of the most popular board game classics. Walmart is offering the Pandemic board game on clearance for only $14.12, a hefty 70% off the original $45 MSRP. Get free shipping for Walmart+ members or on orders $35 or more (otherwise you have to pay a $6.99 shipping fee). The price of this game dropped to about $16 last week, but this deal is even better.
Pandemic Board Game for $14.12
Pandemic was released back in 2008, but the gameplay is so fundamentally intuitive and engaging that it’s still one of the best beginner board games you can get right now. For new or casual board gamers seeking a cooperative experience rather than a competitive one, there are few games that offer it quite as well as Pandemic. Each player will be assigned one of six potential jobs, such as the Dispatcher, which can move other players around the map, or the Medic, which can remove extra diseases from their location; you and the other players will need to work together to cure and eradicate four deadly diseases that are quickly spreading around the globe. This board game is worth it at MSRP, it’s practically a must add to your collection at this bargain price point.
If you’ve replayed the game enough times, there are also many different thematic expansions to keep it fresh. If you’ve run it completely dry and nothing you can add on can convince you otherwise, we have plenty of other recommendations on fantastic board games that might whet your appetite.
You might have heard about a game called Wingspan, which went from being acclaimed in the hobby space to selling a massive million-plus copies in retail. It did so not only by being a fun board game but thanks to its accessible and appealing theme where players manage a bird sanctuary. It was not without its critics, particularly over its slightly repetitive structure, and those concerns have fed into the design of a more complex re-skin, Wyrmspan, where players represent mighty dragon wranglers in a fantasy setting.
What’s in the Box
The original game was famous for its high production values–that’s another key plank of its wide appeal–and while Wyrmspan isn’t quite as pretty, it doesn’t disappoint in that department either. It has a collection of multicolored, speckled resin eggs just like its predecessor, a slew of punch out cardboard resource tokens and two neat plastic storage boxes to keep them in. The coins are cardboard but are silvered, which is a lovely touch.
Players each get a selection of wooden cubes and an adventurer piece in their color, along with one of five boards to track their growing menagerie of dragons, which is where most of the game state will get tracked. There are three other shared boards, one to track the round and its associated bonuses, another is a dragon guild board with four different bonus tiles to sit in the middle, and the final one organizes the dragon and cave decks.
The dragon deck is enormous–almost 200 cards–each with its own distinctive art. While the dragons are impressive, it’s not on a par with the luminous illustrations of real-world birds in Wingspan. And the graphic design generally verges on the bland, with most of the boards being empty space printed with generic fantasy-style fonts. Not that that matters so much once they’re covered in face-up dragons.
Rules and How It Plays
If you’re familiar with Wingspan you’ll already have a good grasp on how to play Wyrmspan–there’s a boxout in the rules that should make learning it a cinch–but there are some key differences. Players start each of four rounds with six coins, and each of the game’s three actions–excavate, entice and explore–costs a coin to perform. Sometimes an action will cost an additional coin or give you a coin back, so the number of actions you can take each turn varies.
Excavate lets you play cave cards from your hand into one of three different dragon habitats on your player board. You’ll need to have a cave card to get dragons into anything other than the initial slot, and playing a card also nets you a bonus printed on the card, such as additional resources or card draws. Entice allows you to play a dragon from your hand into an empty cave. This will cost you resources like meat and gold, printed on the dragon’s card, in addition to the coin. Dragons are a major source of victory points, and most have other printed effects.
Some dragons have an ability when played, others at the end of a round, but for most you’ll need the third action type, Explore, to get the most out of them. This is the most complex action, in which you send your little adventurer meeple into any inhabited caves, gaining benefits depending on which habitat you’re exploring and what dragons you’ve got played there. The Crimson Cavern will let you get food resources to spend on dragons, while the Golden Grotto and Amethyst Abyss will net you cave and dragon cards, respectively, from a face-up selection. The more dragons in a given habitat, the deeper you can go and the better the rewards will be.
The dragon deck is enormous – almost 200 cards – each with its own distinctive art.
You’re thus immediately caught in a classic board game dilemma: you need food and cave cards to play dragons, but without dragons, it’s hard to get food and cave cards. There’s nothing for it but to bite the bullet and take some pathetically weak explore actions while you try and build a strategy, but the big question is what aspects are you going to favor, and which can you neglect?
Decisions here will be heavily impacted by what dragon and cave cards you start with. For example, some cave cards give you food tokens, so you might feel you can wait on populating your Crimson Cavern. And this is where the additional complexity of Wyrmspan begins to bear fruit over its predecessor. The extra concepts ensure there’s a lot more interplay in effects between the cards in your hand and the actions you can take, ensuring there’s more strategy and tactics in your choices.
Perhaps the most notable of these new features is the dragon guild board. You can earn moves on this board in various ways, and each earns you a small bonus from the space you land on. However, for each half-cycle you get to pick a larger bonus from the tile in the middle, many of which include big end-game scoring bonuses. The rewards you get here are substantial enough to build a strategy around, and with four different middle tiles together with that colossal stack of dragon cards there’s a ton of variety to explore during repeat plays.
This is where the additional complexity of Wyrmspan begins to bear fruit over its predecessor.
Other particularly noteworthy changes include the removal of the random food roll of Wingspan in favor of a free choice of food resources and the swapping out of action cubes for the coins resource. While the latter might sound like a small change it has a big impact, because now cards can earn or cost you coins, changing the amount of actions you can take in a turn, which you have to factor into your planning. It even introduces a bigger element of timing into the game, as if you have more or less actions than other players it will change the urgency with which you feel you might have to take things from the shared boards, like the selection of face-up dragons and caves.
Hatchlings, a specific subtype of dragon card, add to this sense of time-based pressure. They can be awkward to put into play because they require milk, a resource that’s otherwise largely useless. But once on your player mat, each visit from an adventurer yields a bonus until the third, which offers an extra-impressive benefit. This imparts a real sense of urgency to try and get these whelps played, to make sure you’ve got time for enough visits to trigger the bonus and enjoy its effects.
However, timing your plays effectively to get what you need before others do is about the only level of player interaction you’ll find in the game. For most of it, you’ll be preoccupied with building your own dragon-powered game engine, not caring what your opponents are doing. Thankfully, this is a fully absorbing task on its own, thanks to all the different ways in which card effects overlap, and the sheer amount of in-game variety takes up some of the slack left by the lack of in-game interaction.
World of Warcraft’s grand nostalgia tour of old content is going strong, with Blizzard announcing that in addition to World of Warcraft: Classic adding the Cataclysm expansion, it’s running a new event that will send players back to 2012’s Mists of Pandaria expansion.
The event is called World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria, and it will be available to all WoW subscribers as a separate playable game regardless of whether they play retail, classic, or both. Players will create new characters and level at super speed from 10 to 70 through the Mists of Pandaria expansion, playing through quests, dungeons, raids and other events as they were back in the day, but with a twist. Powerful items will be more readily available than before and with new customization options, and any collected items can be used as cosmetic upgrades in the main retail game.
Notably, this isn’t World of Warcraft: Classic. Remix uses character talents, classes, and abilities from the current retail version, and characters will be able to be carried over at the end of Remix into the main game. Blizzard is teasing that the new Mists perks and upgrades will “enhance” current character abilities, so it will be interesting to see what, for instance, a Demon Hunter or a Dracthyr can get up to when plopped into the Timeless Isle.
This Remix event seems to be taking cues from a number of other successes World of Warcraft has enjoyed recently. Like battle royale mode Plunderstorm, it’s a limited-time event separate from the main versions of the game with rewards that can carry over. Like Classic, it’s an effort at revisiting a specific point in Warcraft history, but like Season of Discovery, there are a number of new twists. Blizzard seems poised to capitalize on a fan-favorite expansion here, and perhaps remind players of some of its key lore points ahead of the next retail expansion, The War Within. Could the Sha play a role in the Worldsoul Saga? What about Y’Sharrj? We’ll have to wait and see.
It’s a busy time in World of Warcraft right now. Limited-time battle royale event Plunderstorm is chugging along as the current main expansion, Dragonflight, winds down with upcoming closing event Dark Heart. The next expansion, The War Within is planned for release later this year. And in Classic, Cataclysm just got a release date of May 20, with a pre-patch on April 30.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Vampire Survivors is officially come to PlayStation platforms. Announced during today’s Triple-I Initiative showcase, Vampire Survivors’ devs confirmed that the wildly popular roguelite will be releasing this summer. It was previously released on PC, Switch, mobile, and Xbox.
Additionally, new Vampire Survivors DLC was revealed, this time featuring characters from Contra. They include Brad Fang from Contra: Hard Corps, better-known as the wolf with the gun grafted to his arm. The new DLC will be out May 9.
Developing…
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
This excellent deal is back! Amazon is offering the powerful and high capacity Anker PowerCore 737 24,000mAh USB Power Bank for only $90, a massive 40% price drop from its original $150 MSRP. This is close to the highest capacity power bank you’re allowed to bring on airplane carry-on, and it also boasts an absolutely massive 140W of USB power delivery to charge even the hungriest MacBook Pro.
Anker PowerCore 737 24,000mAh Power Bank for $90
with 140W of USB Type-C Power Delivery
The Anker PowerCore 737 can be used like any other power bank; it does a fine job of charging any of your standard mobile electronics. It has two USB Type-C ports and one USB Type-A port. One of the USB Type-C ports is bi-directional, meaning it can be used to charge devices AND it can also be used to charge the power bank itself. The massive 24,000mAh is just under the TSA’s 27,000mAh limit; it can charge a Nintendo Switch OLED over 5 times, iPhone 15 Pro Max over 5 times, Steam Deck over 4 times, and an ASUS ROG Ally over 9 times. The power bank is physically larger than smaller capacity ones and weighs in at 1.4 pounds.
What really makes special about the PowerCore 737, however, is it’s massive power delivery spec. The 737 is capable of delivery 140W of power output That’s enough power to charge the 16″ MacBook Pro laptop even while you’re using it. That kind of power output is hard to find in a power bank and usually pricier.
The Anker 737 is our pick for best Steam Deck / ASUS ROG Ally charger
We picked the Anker 737 as our favorite portable charger for the Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally portable gaming handhelds. Portable PC gaming has never been better, but there’s still a way to go when it comes to batteries in these incredible devices. Both the ROG Ally and Steam Deck suffer from a short battery life when gaming on the go. For instance, when playing most games at 60 FPS, you’re likely looking at four hours of battery life, at most. During our review, we even found games like God of War or Spider-Man would tap out in under 2-hours as well. At the end of the day, you’ll never get the full potential out of your Steam Deck or ROG Ally if you’re not equipped with a decent portable charger.
The best PS5 deal we’ve ever seen has just got a lot better. PS5’s latest slim model bundle with Spider-Man 2 is now down to just $449.99 at Amazon (see here) or you can get the Digital Edition of this bundle for just $399.99 at Best Buy (see here). These are huge, and well worth considering alongside all the other top PlayStation offers right now.
Now that PS5 consoles are regularly available to buy, it’s also an excellent time to start picking up games, SSDs, accessories, and more for it; including a huge discount on this 4TB WD Black SSD at Amazon. Below, you can find a variety of different sales on everything from games to SSDs and even information on where to buy a PS5 now.
There are quite a few game deals worth checking out right now. One of our absolute favorite deals at the moment is on Persona 3 Reload: Standard Edition, which you can pick up for $39.99 right now on Amazon. We have several more physical game deals listed below, and if you want to check out some digital game deals, make sure to have a look through the PlayStation Store’s digital game sales.
PS5 Slim Bundle Drops to Just $449 (Or $399.99 for the Digital Edition)
This previous Black Friday quality deal has managed to get even better. Now down to just $449, you can get the PS5 (slim model) and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 at a big discount. Plus, considering the cost of buying each of these separately ($69.99 + $499.99 = $569.98), your savings are significantly more than at first glance. And, if you’d prefer the Digital Edition of this bundle, you can grab it for just $399.99 as well! It’s an excellent deal you don’t want to miss out on.
WD_BLACK PS5 4TB SSD for $296.95 at Amazon
Looking to completely maximize your PS5 storage capabilities? Then this is the deal for you. For a limited time only, this PS5 4TB SSD is available at Amazon for just $296.95 (see here). It has an MSRP of $699.99 which is rather dramatic, but in reality, this and many other 4TB SSDs have been sitting around $280-$300 recently.
Note that Sony recommends a heatsink attached to your SSD and not all SSDs listed here have pre-installed heatsinks. For the ones that do, we’ll be sure to mention it. For the ones that don’t, all you have to do is purchase your own heatsink (like this one for $9) and install it yourself. You can also check out the best PS5 2TB SSD deals here, or see more of our favorite deals below.
Best PS5 Headset Deals: 22% Off the Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 & More Headset Deals
There’s no shortage of PS5-compatible headsets. If you’re constantly having to turn down the volume when you play, you might want to pick up one of these, then you can listen to your games as loud as you darn well please. And if you’d like to see even more options that are worth buying, check out our collection of thebest gaming headsets.
It doesn’t need to have a massive discount to be a good deal, so we thought it would be a great idea to pick out our absolute favorite PS5 and PlayStation offerings that would be relevant to buy no matter the time of year, or the sales going on. From the latest DualSense controllers, to the very best PS5 SSDs on the market, we’ve got it all right here.
Generally, the best time to buy a PS5 console is during major yearly shopping events such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the various Amazon Prime Day sales. Although PlayStation consoles rarely go on sale, you can often scoop up limited-time bundles that include additional an additional game or two, and more.
How to Trade in Your Old PlayStation Consoles
If you’re looking to trade in your old PlayStation consoles, you can do so at select retailers in-store and online. Often, the most widely available retailers are GameStop and Best Buy. However, you can also trade your used devices online at retailers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Some retailers will offer you cash for your used goods, while others may provide you with a gift card that can be used in-store and online. This is a great way to offload your old gaming gear and get some money that you can put towards a newer console and games.
While trading devices in at retailers will often net you the lowest amount for your used consoles, there are also online marketplaces such as eBay, Craigslist, and OfferUp that may fetch higher prices, but you’ll often be responsible for packing and shipping costs, or be required to meet someone in person for the transaction, the latter of which poses its own risks.
With how expensive gaming is getting in 2024, we’re trying to save you as much money as possible on the games and other tech you actually want to buy. We’ve got great deal roundups available for all major platforms such as Switch and Xbox, and keep these updated daily with brand new offers. If you’re trying to keep costs down while maintaining your favorite hobby, stay tuned for more incredible discounts.
Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.
Diablo 4 launched summer 2023 across PC and console, including the last generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles. That means it was built to run well on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, hardware now over a decade old.
Although Blizzard has yet to release new features for Diablo 4 that leave the last generation of consoles, and indeed the current minimum specifications on PC, behind, Diablo boss Rod Fergusson told IGN in a recent interview that the time may well come for such a tough decision to be made. Right now, though, with the upcoming launch of Season 4 and, later this year, the game’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, Blizzard is maintaining parity.
“There’s always a time and a place for when maybe it’s time to no longer support a platform,” Fergusson said. “I don’t think we’re at that time. But we have a long road for Diablo 4, and so we do talk about, ‘hey we have this idea for a feature, but maybe it’s not a feature our min spec or gen eight players can support, so it’s not something we can do today.’ But we keep pushing the boundaries on that.”
Fergusson and Diablo art director John Mueller spoke to IGN about various features coming to Diablo 4 with Season 4 next month, including a significant increase in monster density to make the action role-playing game feel more action-packed. This density increase comes with associated performance demands, however, although Blizzard was able to make it work across all platforms while maintaining a solid frame-rate.
Meanwhile, Blizzard just added ray tracing graphics technology to Diablo 4 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X. It is not available on Xbox Series S, Xbox One, or PS4. On console, in order not to compromise overall performance, this feature is locked at 30 frames per second.
“We’re pretty good at finding fallbacks,” Mueller explained. “That’s how we think of it. We’ll figure out a way to do a fallback, like if there’s something really awesome we want to do. I don’t think we’ve been gated by it. We’ve generally leaned into it, and it’s been a creative challenge to figure out, okay, how do we accomplish that on gen eight? So the two things will look slightly different depending on the platform. We just got ray-tracing in, that was a huge feature we added. It scales up and down depending on whatever you’re playing it on.”
By the time the Vessel of Hatred expansion launched later in 2024, the Xbox One and PS4 will be 11 years old. Plenty of developers have left these consoles behind to focus on the more powerful current generation, or Gen 9 as it’s called, but Blizzard isn’t ready to let go just yet.
“We’re looking at that,” Fergusson said. “It’s part of the conversation, always. Like, we have this idea for a new feature, can we do it based on what we’re supporting today? Yes or no? And generally, as John was saying, we can. We find ways to do it.”
For more on Diablo 4 Season 4, datamining and secrets, and the Game Pass launch, check out IGN’s interview in full.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Kingdom Hearts 4 was announced two years ago today, April 10, 2024, and fans are pining for an update from developer Square Enix.
Discussing the anniversary on Reddit, fans were forced to assure each other the Kingdom Hearts 4 reveal wasn’t just a shared fever dream but did actually happen, as despite coming out big with a lengthy trailer, Square Enix hasn’t made any official announcements about the game since.
“I’m still not certain any of this even happened,” joked JustAquietwallflower. “Like, is any of this for real or not? I’m so ready to cry over a new trailer.”
Fans were also quick, if not a little pained, to point out Kingdom Hearts 3 was released more than five years after its reveal trailer, which perhaps explains why they have a sense of humor about the lengthy wait for more information.
“I’m convinced [creator Tetsuya] Nomura thinks Kingdom Hearts fans don’t age,” said forgedfox3. “Only 11 years to go for its release,” added Malkaz45. “Kingdom Hearts 4 isn’t coming out until there are four to six lore critical games on disparate platforms,” said patmorgan234.
That’s because, despite being called Kingdom Hearts 4, the incoming title is far from the fourth game in the series. Between Kingdom Hearts 2 and 3, Square Enix released other entries (most of which had important story developments) including Re:Chain of Memories, Coded, 358/2 Days, Birth by Sleep, Re:coded, Dream Drop Distance, 1.5 Remix, 2.5 Remix, and 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue.
The franchise hasn’t been as busy since Kingdom Hearts 4 was announced though. Its reveal trailer showed flashy gameplay with protagonist Sora but Square Enix said this was from an Unreal Engine 4 demo, whereas the actual game will be made in Unreal Engine 5.
Fans are just desperate for any sort of announcement, though. “Final Fantasy fans have been eating good,” said DonovanKreed. “Meanwhile us Kingdom Hearts fans are stuck in purgatory.” The Final Fantasy series, of which Kingdom Hearts is a spin-off and also from Square Enix, has had three mainline releases since Kingdom Hearts 3 was released (in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Final Fantasy 16, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth) alongside myriad substantial updates to massively multiplayer online game Final Fantasy 14.
Some fans are taking this as a good sign, however. “Now that Rebirth is out, I really hope and believe that there will be news about Kingdom Hearts 4 soon,” said Alex de Souza on ResetEra. “It’s up there with Hollow Knight: Silksong and Death Stranding 2 as my most anticipated game.”
Only time will tell when Square Enix shares more about Kingdom Hearts 4, but fans will continue to wait patiently in the meantime. Its reveal trailer has already been analyzed completely, and some even think there’s evidence of a Star Wars section.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
A dedicated Far Cry 5 player is using the game’s map editor to recreate the iconic Whiterun from The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.
YouTuber Mojo Swoptops shared a short video of their work so far, where they walk through the main street of their Whiterun recreation. Starting at the entrance to the city, they walk past The Drunken Huntsman, Warmaiden’s, and Breezehome before arriving in the marketplace, where The Bannered Mare, Belethor’s General Goods, and Severio Pelagia’s house are all on show.
“I decided not to replicate it 1:1 and instead have some fun using some of the other interesting assets I have at my disposal,” Mojo Swoptops said in the description. “So far I am happy with the progress, but nothing can match the quality and art direction of the original Bethesda product.”
While it’s just the main street at the moment, this Whiterun recreation will seemingly include the entire city one day. Mojo Swoptops shared the creation on Reddit too, where one user asked: “Have you built the Cloud District yet? Oh, what am I saying. Of course you haven’t,” a reference to the infamous Whiterun resident Nazeem. Despite the joke, Mojo Swoptops assured they were already working on this part of Whiterun and they’d share more when it was finished.
It’s not the first Skyrim location Mojo Swoptops has worked to recreate either, as another video shows their rendition of the Thieves Guild’s base of operations Riften.
In our 9/10 review of the beloved RPG, IGN said: “Skyrim is a rare kind of intensely personal, deeply rewarding experience, and one of the best role-playing games yet produced.”
